There are few devices sexier than Itech's new virtual keyboard. When
you plug in the small black unit, it projects a laser image of a
standard keyboard. Touch a key and you just typed something.

The device itself is about the size of a small
candy bar. If you touch any of the virtual keys, the projector
recognizes that as a keystroke. It even provides the option of
sounding a key click if you want. The keystrokes can be transferred
to any nearby computer, PDA or cell phone either through a cable or
Bluetooth
wireless connection.
Users agree that this virtual keyboard works very well indeed,
but plugging it in can be a problem. The device works on battery,
but if you want to plug it in, you'll need an adapter for the
European-style plug that comes with it. An adapter typically costs
$5 or less. If you want to use the wireless capability, which really
makes the most sense for a device like this, you can buy Bluetooth
receivers for $20 at Amazon and $40 at Kensington.com. The virtual keyboard itself sells for $180 at
www.laser-keyboard.com. You can get more technical info at the
company's Web site:
www.itechdynamic.com.
Small Networks

Almost all small businesses and many homes have more than one
computer now, and they usually want to link them together in some
kind of network. In the old
days, we used to transfer files between computers by copying them to
a disk and then taking the disk over to the other computer. That was
called a sneaker network. That was yesterday. Today we wirelessly
stream video, music, games and Internet phone calls all over the
house.

Most
wireless routers don't work well as the distance from the router
approaches 100 feet. The range also depends on how many walls are
between your computer and the router: more walls, less range. The
rate of data transfer tends to degrade with data transfer as well.

Netgear's new RangeMax
Wireless Router WNR854T is the best so far at speed and distance. In
tests, it performed well at distances of 130 to 150 feet between
router and computer. The data transfer rate is a maximum 300
megabits per second if you're close to the router, about half that
at the edge of its range. Translated into plain English, that's a
stunning 7 million words a second.Amazon.com sells the router for
about $145. You will also need a Netgear WN511T wireless notebook
adapter, which sells for about $63. Note that any wireless router
system will require you to have receivers for each computer in the
network, so you can't get away from this extra cost. You can,
however, also connect most wireless routers, including this one,
directly by regular Ethernet cable and skip the wireless receivers.
There's more info at
www.netgear.com, and tech support is round the clock.

To PDF or not to PDF

Two new $99 programs from Nuance and ABBYY take dead aim at
Adobe's $499 Acrobat Professional and offer to do nearly the same
thing for much less. (Note: PDF stands for "portable document
format" and means that any digital image saved in that format will
look the same on a screen or in print regardless
of the kind of computer you are using or the software it was created
with.) The two programs create PDFs and convert existing PDFs into
editable documents.
Nuance's PDF Converter Professional 4 did a great job of
duplicating a complex newsletter layout. Holding onto the formatting
while making a PDF editable throws many PDF programs for a loop, so
this was a big plus. On the minus side, we tried to convert an
accounting PDF document into a Word or Excel file, and while it
preserved the formatting and text perfectly, it left out the
numbers. That was a pretty big minus.

Next we turned to ABBYY, which has long been our favorite maker
of OCR products, software that makes any scanned page of text
editable. It can also convert a document to HTML code, which can be
posted directly to the Web. ABBYY's PDF Transformer 2.0 Pro did a
terrible job of preserving the layout and formatting of our test
newsletter. But it did a fantastic job preserving everything in the
accounting document.

Often, people want a PDF document to be searchable by
key words, using just the free Acrobat Reader. Both programs can
handle this, but the ABBYY program is the first utility in its class
that translates static, image-only PDF files into searchable PDFs in
one step. Nuance can also convert text into speech, by the way,
enabling PDFs to be published as podcasts.

The Nuance program allows readers to collaborate
on a document; ABBYY does not. You can send a PDF to colleagues and
they can highlight passages, cross out words, stamp things
"confidential" and type in comments that appear
in
colored call-out boxes. This is similar to Adobe's Acrobat
Professional 7. The recipient of a PDF from either program can view
all of your comments, highlight passages, etc., and needs nothing
more than the free Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded from
Adobe. What's a user to do? Well, all the
programs discussed here have free trial versions, so you can try
them out and see which is best for your purposes. You
can find out more and get those trial versions at
www.abbyy.com,
www.nuance.com and
www.adobe.com.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns here at
oncomp.com or seven years worth of columns at
oncomp2.com